9.25.2012

Cyberattackers disrupted websites operated by Wells Fargo WFC & Co. Tuesday, continuing a string of attacks that started last week at J.P. Morgan Chase JPM & Co. and Bank of America Corp. BAC
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Sitedown.com received 330 complaints about the Bank of America outage and nearly 1,000 complaints about J.P. Morgan's problems over the past week.
Jeff Herdell, who runs sitedown.com, said the Wells Fargo complaints were significant because the company rarely experiences problems with its websites.
A Wells Fargo spokeswoman confirmed that some customers were having problems logging in on Tuesday but said the San Francisco-based company was working to resolve the issue. She added that the outage was a systems problem and that no customer-account information was compromised.
The scope of the disruption has raised eyebrows.
"The amount of bandwidth that is flooding the websites is very large, much larger than in other attacks, and in a sense unprecedented," said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief executive of CrowdStrike, a private security firm investigating the attacks.

Iran likely orchestrated the cyber attacks that impacted the websites of Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase last week in retaliation for U.S. economic sanctions on the country, Sen. Joe Lieberman told C-SPAN.
The comments from Lieberman, who is chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, stand in contrast with online claims from a group that claimed responsibility for the attacks and cited anger over a recent YouTube video mocking Islam.
“I don’t believe these were just hackers,” Lieberman said on Friday evening while appearing on C-SPAN. “I believe this was done by Iran and the Qods force, which has its own developing cyber attack capacity. And I believe it was in response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.”
According to Reuters, the hacking of websites and networks at BofA began in late 2011 and escalated this year.